The Network aims to improve peace, security and democratic development in the Region of the South Caucasus via young women’s increased participation in peace and security policy analysis and planning. We are here to open up a discourse on peace and security and women's participation in Regional developments.

четверг, 18 сентября 2014 г.

Putin's aggression has left Europe in pre-war state, says top Russian writer

By Luke Harding

In an essay for the Guardian, Mikhail Shishkin describes president as an 'insipid colonel' terrified of losing power

Russia's pre-eminent literary
novelist today warns that Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine amounts to a
"black hole" that threatens to suck in the whole of Europe.

In an essay for the Guardian,
Mikhail Shishkin says that Russia's aggression in Ukraine has left the
unsuspecting European continent in a state of "pre-war". He says that
unlike Russians – conditioned to expect violence by remorseless state
propaganda – Europeans have not yet grasped "the new reality that has set
in".

Shishkin is considered by many
to be his country's greatest living author . He is the only contemporary writer
to have won all three of Russia's most prestigious literary prizes, including
the Russian Booker. Resident in Switzerland, he faced official vitriol after
refusing to take part on a Kremlin-sponsored literary tour of the US last year.
Shishkin said he didn't want to represent a country where "power has been
seized by a corrupt criminal regime".

The son of a Ukrainian mother
and Russian father, Shishkin describes Russia's president as a "one very
lonely ageing man" and "an insipid colonel" terrified of losing
power. He says the "demise of Hussein, Mubarak and Gaddafi" and the
flight of Ukraine's leader Viktor Yanukovych spooked Putin, and prompted his
seizure of Crimea in the spring and attack on eastern Ukraine.

"The instinct of
self-preservation kicked in immediately. The formula for saving any
dictatorship is universal: create an enemy; start a war. The state of war is
the regime's elixir of life," the writer says.

Shishkin suggests that under
Putin – who denied there were Russian troops in Crimea, only to later admit
with a grin that they were there - Russia has gone "back to the Soviet
times of total lies". The novelist says that ordinary Russians are
complicit in this lying, with the survival instinct under which Soviet citizens
"lived for decades" now emphatically back.

"When Putin tells blatant
lies in the face of western politicians, he then watches their reaction with
vivid interest and not without pleasure, enjoying their confusion and
helplessness. He wants Kiev to return on its knees, like a prodigal son, to the
fatherly embrace of the empire. He is sure that Europe will boil with
indignation, but eventually calm down, abandoning Ukraine to brotherly
rape," he writes.

The novelist – whose latest
work The Light and the Dark appeared in English translation last year - is
sceptical that western sanctions will have any effect in Moscow. Rather, he
says, Russia is ready and psychologically prepared for further conflict. It is
already in "an undeclared war against the west". His conclusion is
bleak: "One needs to realise: post-war Europe has already become pre-war
Europe."

Facts from History

CEDAW

UNSCR 1325

Strategy for engagement and joint actions on confidence building and P2P diplomacy that involve women. Final Report

YOUTH PEACE PLAN OF GEORGIA

This publication is produced within the framework of the project - ‘‘Support Democratic Participation of Young Women in Building Peace and Stability in Georgia’’ implemented in Georgia by International Network for Civil Development - INCD in partnership with Young Women Experts’ Network for Peace and Security (YWEPS) and with the financial support of the Embassy of Canada through Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI).